He Died with a Felafel in His Hand Read Online Free PDF Page A

thing. I don’t want to live with a sinner’. And then she went apeshit, screaming, ‘Don’t you know what you’re doing is wrong? The Lord has a special place in Hell for the fornicators. I couldn’t bear the guilt of having a fornicator under the roof of the House of the Lord.’ I spun out, struck dumb. She was psychotic for a few minutes, yelling all this fire and brimstone stuff and how there was no hope for me. And then she switched totally, went dead calm and said, ‘But if you change your ways I’m willing to let you stay.’ I moved out the next day. I’d been there less than a week but she kept a month’s rent.
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    Gothic design tip: dead things are so cool they just have to be nailed to the wall. The freshly rendered goat’s head actually replaced a pressed duck which had been there for two years. Somebody had found it in Chinatown, semi-cooked and semi-glazed, then pressure-sealed in a vacuum bag. This duck was already rotten, twisted, half burned and bereft of feathers when they nailed it over the fireplace. Over the years the bag lost its seal and the duck started coming out and making its way down the wall.
    I’d thought about cutting out earlier when I woke to the sound of this pair of Goths having sex on the floor next to me, and again when I discovered that although the water was connected, the kitchen sink wasn’t – you pulled the plug and it just spilled out onto the floor. But Satan’s living room did it for me.
    You get these moments, these Satan’s lounge room, goat’s head moments, and you wonder what forces delivered you to this place at this time. It’s as though your life travels through this complex grid where stuff happens, like you date this girl or you go to that movie or you come home to find a goat’s head nailed to the wall, and a little point of light plots the event on the grid. All the points are woven together by this weird mathematical program that determines the course of your life and the future – each little moment, each point of light, driven along by the falling numbers of some impenetrable logarithm.
    Hmmm. Guess I’d better get back to it.
    The Boulevarde was advertised as a top floor three bedroom apartment. The third bedroom was actually down in the basement garage. Mel and I took the two rooms upstairs and banished Tom, the quiet engineering student, to the carpark. He didn’t mind it down there. He pulled apart a security light switch and tapped into the unit block’s power supply. After that, our power bills were paid by the body corporate and we ran every light and appliance we owned twenty-four hours a day. Tom, who is a vice president with an international airline nowadays, seemed to live off the land back then. His success in making jam from the blackberries he collected down by the river led us to plant a choko vine down there. We managed one harvest, but nobody in the house ate chokos and they rotted under the kitchen sink. His favourite meal was fish finger pie. (Roll six fish fingers and two cheese sticks into a lot of dough. Bake.) On special occasions, he’d make raspberry pudding, a poisonous blend of red cordial and custard powder. It looked like blood soup and tasted like a bowl full of water with human hair soaking in it.
    I learned something about the value of people in that flat. Mel’s boyfriend Warren was just a carpenter’s apprentice from Cloncurry. He was never going to read any Foucault, and seeing as I had a crush on his girlfriend, we were probably never going to get along. But we did. Warren had a good soul and he pulled cones like a trooper – our relationship was based around these intangible moments of stoned camaraderie, where we would talk … sort of. And if the conversation became a little stilted, we could always stimulate it artificially – a cone before breakfast, a few cones at lunch, a joint with dinner, two or three more cones with MASH. I had to cut back on the smoke after fading out during an early